If you travel to Newport, Rhode Island, and visit the Naval War College’s Museum, you will see exhibits related to Alfred Thayer Mahan, the second president of the war college who in the 1880s delivered his famous lectures on naval history and sea power — lectures that he transformed into his most famous book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 — to students in that very building. In all, Mahan wrote 20 books and hundreds of essays until his death in 1914, a few months after the outbreak of the First World War. He was the late 19th-early 20th centuries’ most influential proponent of sea power as a means of international preeminence. But his maritime geopolitical concepts still have relevance in the 21st century, nowhere more so than in the current Sino-U.S. rivalry.
Mahan was born in 1840 on the grounds of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where his father, Dennis Hart Mahan, taught civil and military engineering to students who would one day fight on the battlefields of the American Civil War. Alfred Thayer Mahan, too, served in that war aboard ships of the Union Navy. After the war, Mahan served on several U.S. warships, but his interests and talents were intellectual. His first book, The Gulf and Inland Waters (1883), analyzed Union naval operations during the Civil War. The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (1890), was his second book, and it gained for him national and international fame. The navies of the world took note, including the British and German navies, which proceeded to engage in a naval arms race that helped bring about the First World War, and the Japanese Navy, which won dramatic naval victories over Russia in 1904-05.
Mahan quickly became one of America’s most popular public intellectuals, writing books and essays on naval history, naval commanders, and strategic and geopolitical subjects. His “sea power” histories included the two-volume work The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire and Sea Power and its Relations to the War of 1812, also a two-volume work. Perhaps his most perceptive and predictive geopolitical books were Retrospect and Prospect, The Problem of Asia, The Interest of America in International Conditions, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future, and Naval Strategy. Mahan’s influence extended to the White House when his friend and admirer Theodore Roosevelt became president. Roosevelt, as a young man, had written a naval history of the War of 1812.
Not all of Mahan’s concepts apply to 21st-century naval warfare and geopolitics. He wrote before the age of naval air power and aircraft carriers, during the infancy of submarine warfare, and long before the age of nuclear-powered warships. But his appreciation of the importance of geography, naval bases, and relative population and natural resources, his assessment of the importance of naval chokepoints, blockades, command of the sea, his appreciation of the economic aspects of sea power, his concept of the oceans and seas as a “wide common,” and his understanding of the global balance of power remain relevant to 21st century geopolitics.
All you need to do is survey some of the 21st century’s books and essays on naval warfare and geopolitics to appreciate the continuing relevance of Mahan. Two of our nation’s most respected naval and geopolitical thinkers, James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, wrote a book in 2008 titled Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan. More recently, Benjamin Armstrong’s book 21st Century Mahan analyzed the continuing relevance of Mahan’s works to 21st-century global politics and naval warfare. In 2017, then Strategy Bridge associate editor B.A. Friedman wrote an article titled “Command of the Littorals—Insight from Mahan.” Patrick J. Garrity wrote an essay in April 2021, titled “Mahan, Chokepoints, and the Panama Canal.” A recent article in Geopolitical Monitor titled “The Strait of Hormuz and the Power of Chokepoints” cites Mahan. In January 2024, the Naval Institute’s flagship journal, Proceedings, published a piece by a retired Army officer titled “Mahan as Geoeconomic Strategist.”
But it isn’t even necessary to peruse the ubiquitous literature on Mahan’s continuing relevance to know that we are in the midst of a Mahanian revival. The geoeconomic importance of the Strait of Hormuz and Strait of Malacca, and other strategic chokepoints (Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb, Gibraltar, the Panama Canal) have been in the news recently, and the ongoing naval rivalry in the western Pacific is a defining feature of the U.S.-China Cold War II (to use Niall Ferguson’s phrase). American national security strategists rightly worry about shipbuilding disparities between the U.S. and China, as well as China’s control over rare earth minerals. China, meanwhile, understands its vulnerabilities surrounding the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca, which are key parts of its trade and energy lifelines. With tariffs and blockades, we have entered a new age of economic warfare and statecraft that Mahan viewed as being waged by sea power in its broadest sense.
A few months ago, Benjamin Jensen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute wrote that in its ongoing competition with China, the “United States needs to revisit the core relationship between economic and sea power proposed in the late nineteenth century by Alfred Thayer Mahan,” and praised the Trump administration for establishing a maritime network (“shipyards, dry docks, cranes, port infrastructure, maritime software, fuel logistics, mariners, component suppliers, autonomous systems, financing tools, and allied production networks”) that “can mobilize the capital, workforce, and manufacturing capacity needed to reconnect economic and sea power.” The Mahanian revival is geoeconomics at its best.
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